Deborah Bull

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Presenter1:03

My castaway this week is the ballerina writer and broadcaster Deborah Bull.

Presenter1:08

The Royal Ballet, where she was a principal dancer for almost two decades, owes a debt of gratitude to the Janice Sutton School of Dance in Skegness. It was there, aged seven, two floors above a fish and chip shop and a row of amusement arcades, and having practised good toes, bad toes, that she discovered precisely what she wanted to do with her life.

Presenter1:29

After many years of success at the top of her profession, she said goodbye to her childhood dream and jetteed into her life's next act, for a time serving as creative director of the Royal Opera House, and more recently working far beyond Covent Garden, promoting creativity and cultural partnerships across Britain. She says I always thought I'd feel a passionate sense of loss when I stopped dancing.

Presenter1:53

What was absolutely wonderful was, as the volume turned up on the new career, the volume turned down on the old one. So, um, Deborah Bill, by your own admission.

Presenter2:02

Ballet leaves an indelible profound mark on a professional dancer. I wonder what mark it's left on you?

Deborah Bull2:08

I think the market's left is a strong sense of values, values which are derived from repeatedly working on yourself, on your profession, the sense of discipline, the sense of teamwork, the sense of playing the long game, the sense of learning from failure, and that constant pushing the boundaries forward whilst respecting the past.

Presenter2:29

I'm afraid to say that I was a little broad brush in the introduction about the name for what it is you do now.

Presenter2:35

So you're gonna have to enlighten me.

Deborah Bull2:37

Well, I joined King's College London after thirty-one years at the Opera House, so that was a very big leap indeed, where I'm Director of Cultural Partnerships, both to ensure that the thinking that's generated in the college gets out into the sector, so that the research is not just words on a page, but as importantly, if you put artists with academics, they will inspire them to innovate, to take leaps of faith, to see the world differently, because that's what artists do.

Presenter3:01

You are well known for your articulacy indeed we've just heard it displayed there in in promoting the arts and helping people to understand why the arts are important. It was whilst you were still a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet that you

Speaker 13:10

And it

Presenter3:13

found your voice publicly, as it were. You took part in a debate at the Oxford Union. The motion was This House believes that the National Lottery gives too much money to the elitest arts. What is your recollection of that night when you got up to speak?

Deborah Bull3:26

I was invited to go down and be on the panel that obviously argued against that notion, and it was a life-changing moment. That act of research in marshalling the arguments was a first really, marshalling arguments in words, not movement, and then seeing the impact. And I think having that sense, and this goes right back to my childhood upbringing, that sense of duty. Somebody's got to speak up for the arts. Why would I renege on that responsibility?

Presenter3:52

And what about being I mean, I I suppose your highly tuned sense of performance and living up to the expectations of an audience stood you in good stead?

Presenter4:01

But being overwhelmed by the surroundings it

Deborah Bull4:04

It was extraordinary. I was conscious of how difficult it is to describe a world in which you're so embedded. I have this with ballet, you know, people say, What is class? What is the bar? How do you really start? And I had the same experience asking people what it would be like at the Oxford Union, because they couldn't tell me the basic things I needed to know, like what do you wear? What's the architecture of the space? How do people address each other? Because for most people who've been within a university environment, that's a given, that's understood. And so I turned up wearing what I thought was quite a natty outfit of trousers and a jacket and a silk shirt. I thought that was fine. What I didn't know was you wear ball gowns in Oxford in the debate. Yes, it's all black tie and ball gowns. So there was I feeling kind of snazzy. But I was aware that I was carrying a card which nobody else was carrying, which was, I'm a performer, I know the arts aren't elitist, and I can tell you why they matter.

Speaker 14:37

And Theater.

Presenter4:52

It's time for the music now, and of course music must have played almost a a day-to-day significance in your life, given that you're a dancer. Um how have you gone about choosing your list?

Deborah Bull5:01

Yeah.

Deborah Bull5:02

You're right. I mean, I am one of those privileged people who has been accompanied every day of my life by live music. Not just music, live music. I've lived my life to the sound of a full orchestra. It's an exceptional thing, really. But what I've done in choosing the list is focus on those pieces of music which trigger emotions and feelings and memories, because I think, you know, on the island that's what I'll want to do, is remember those key moments, those key people in my life. So tell me about the first piece then.

Deborah Bull5:29

My very first dance memory must have been when I was eight or nine and I went to see my sister perform at her grammar school in a concert, an evening of varied pieces. One of the pieces was a dance piece. They danced a piece about the Berlin Wall. And it was my first sense that dance could be something other than fairy tales. It could talk about things that mattered. Moving forwards, I think that moment when the Berlin Wall fell, I think it was the Kennedy's death moment for my generation. We all remember where we were when we heard it. And of course, this piece of music I've picked is the Beethoven 9th, what's traditionally the Ode to Joy, but in this case the Ode to Freedom, which Bernstein conducted six weeks after the wall fell. And I can only imagine what it felt like in Berlin to be shouting, singing freedom across what had been that great divide.

Presenter7:14

Ode to Freedom from Beethoven's Symphony No. Nine, recorded live on the twenty fifth of december, nineteen eighty nine, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Presenter7:22

So Deborah Bill, I think it's about twelve years since you last danced professionally.

Presenter7:26

Are you able now to go to the ballet and enjoy it, or are you always sitting there in the red velvet seat with a a critical sharp appraisal of what's going on on stage?

Deborah Bull7:36

I think I've even gone to that point where I watch it and I see them do extraordinary physical things and say, Oh, how do they do that? It is quite a long time. It's true also that whenever I see anybody go on point or lift their leg in arabesque, you know, the neurons which drive that movement, they fire in my brain too. So I do know exactly what it feels like.

Presenter7:55

You literally feel their pain.

Deborah Bull7:56

Yeah.

Presenter7:57

Not their pain, their achievements. But you have written very vividly about dancing on stage and actually feeling, you know, the explosion of pain in a calf and trying to overcome it. I mean, I've read the sort of visceral descriptions of trying to sort of tamp down this sensation in order to achieve the next move.

Deborah Bull8:14

The old cramp in the left calf. I mean, that's the foetes in Swan Lake when you go up and down on that left leg 32 times. And yes, you're operating often at the limits of endurance. But you have to learn to differentiate that pain between the pain of a serious inflammation. And that's the very tricky thing. You know, the mechanism by which you improve and gain strength is the same mechanism by which you injure yourself, by which I mean when you micro-tear a muscle, it repairs stronger. That's what you do when you go to the gym. Now, if you micro-tear a bit more than micro-tear, then you're injured. That's a very, very fine line. And dancers can struggle to know which side of the line they are. I planned to ask.

Presenter8:15

I mean

Presenter8:52

Ask you how your feet are, but I noticed that you almost danced in here in a pair of very unforgiving-looking kitten heels today. I imagine your feet are fine.

Deborah Bull9:00

They're not bad. I've got one big toe joint, you know, the sort of the bun in which I I danced when I shouldn't have danced. I was coming back from a bad case of salmonella food poisoning. I was not strong enough, and I landed in a crooked way. So that's my one little niggle.

Presenter9:15

And do you dance for pleasure?

Deborah Bull9:17

Well, I do now. I mean, I started off dancing for pleasure. That's how it all began. I used to dance around the house, dance around the street. My mother said, Look, she's going to be a dancer. That's I'm sure where it came from. When I was dancing professionally, I stopped dancing for pleasure. If you're used to having a script, it's very hard when people say you'll go ahead and dance without a script. That's the classic dancer's anxiety dream. It's not being in an exam and not knowing the question, no. It's being on stage, the curtain goes up, the music begins, you think, I haven't got a clue what I'm supposed to be doing.

Presenter9:44

But when you were dancing professionally, would you not get up and have a dance at a party?

Deborah Bull9:47

No, I would rather have put my hands in the fire. I was so unsure of what I was supposed to be doing and so fearful of being exposed. So I really learnt to dance for pleasure after I stopped dancing professionally. Tell me about your next piece of music then. Well, this is a perfect segue into this. So when I was 40, I was invited to go down to Glastonbury for the first time. And all I knew about Glastonbury was perimeter fences, people breaking in, and loud, and drunkenness, and worse. And so I was pretty fearful, but I have long thought that fear isn't a good reason not to do things. So I went down with some friends, and we arrived very late. And in my head, Orbital were playing. Actually, I've looked back. They weren't. That must have been another year, but that's my memory. And so the next track is one of the tracks which will always make me think of dancing in the open air. Nobody's watching you. They can't see you. It's dark. Nobody cares. They're having a great time. So it's Orbital with the signature piece really chime.

Presenter11:18

That was orbital and chime and memories for you, Deborah Bull, of finding your dancing feet at Glastonbury there. So you were born in Derby to Michael and Doreen. Your dad became a vicar. Your mother had been married for a few years at least, and had four children, when

Presenter11:33

Your father said.

Deborah Bull11:34

Top.

Presenter11:34

I've had the calling.

Deborah Bull11:36

Did that good ID? That's right. I was, I think, eighteen months old. I think she was brilliant about it actually, because she was incredibly supportive. Everything was packed into a car, and down we drove to Rochester, where he went to the Theological College, and then when he'd finished his training

Deborah Bull11:51

Back in the car and up to Tupton in Derbyshire, where he had his first parish. And before that your your father had been was he a travelling salesman or he was, he sold televisions and they were both part of the local church. The local church was at the centre of the community. They're involved in amateur dramatics, that's how they met. And my father spent a lot of time with the vicar, I think. And then the story goes he was driving around Leeds with his van.

Presenter11:59

He was

Deborah Bull12:16

and went into the cathedral and sat and thought about it, and then came out and came home and said, I'd like to train for the priesthood.

Presenter12:23

So a salesman and amateur dramatics and then on to the priesthood which is a public role, to what extent do you think you are your parents' child?

Deborah Bull12:32

Do you know, I once had an odd experience of sitting between Mrs. Putin and Mrs. Bush at a dinner. But I spent most of my time talking to Mrs. Putin and was telling her about my parents. And she said at the end of it, she said, Do you know, I think you got the best from your father and the best from your mother, which I took as a huge compliment. So I do think I have elements of both of them. I have my mother's practicality, determination, appetite for hard work, creativity and performance. From my father, you know, I think there is nothing more profound than seeing your dad.

Deborah Bull13:04

every week, put on a dress and stand up in front of a congregation and say what he believes in. So when people say to me now, how come you're not frightened of talking about the value of the arts? I look back and I say, Well, I grew up with it. I grew up with that sense of

Deborah Bull13:18

It's a duty to say what you believe in.

Presenter13:20

Not very many people can say they've sat at a dinner between Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Putin. What were you doing there?

Deborah Bull13:25

It's like a Pete and Dudd story, isn't it? I had that Bridget Bardeau knocking on my window. So I was at the G8 spouses' dinner at Gleneagles. Actually, it was a very extraordinary day. It was the day that the London bombings happened. I sat between Mrs. Bush and Putin. Anish Kapoor and I started a conversation which Mrs. Bush didn't. The story just gets better and better. It does. So Anish and I were putting forward the idea that with any crime, you might have to consider there are two victims, that there is the victim of the crime, but you could look at the perpetrator as being a victim of some sort. Well, Mrs. Bush thought that was relativism, gone mad and turned away. So hence I spent most of the evening talking to Mrs. Putin through a whispering translator.

Presenter13:26

It isn't ridiculous.

Presenter13:32

Yeah.

Speaker 113:32

Uh

Presenter13:40

The story just gets better and better.

Presenter13:54

Hmm.

Presenter14:00

Bitch.

Deborah Bull14:00

It's just as long as we've got

Presenter14:01

That cleared up. Time for some more music then, Deborah Bull. We're on your third.

Deborah Bull14:05

Well, we were a musical family always, and my most vivid memory is of my father singing Streets of London by Ralph MacTell. And in fact, he wrote to Ralph MacTell and said, I'm singing your song, do you mind? And he wrote back, said, I know of two hundred and twenty versions. Yours is the two hundred and twenty first. Not please send me my royalties, which I thought was lovely. But this song I realize now was the first time that the bubble of my fairy tale childhood began to open up. That I had a sense that the streets of London were not paved with gold, as Dick Whittington might have us believe, but actually there is sadness and there is need. And so I look at this song and I see

Deborah Bull14:46

Just a sense of me beginning to grow up.

Speaker 114:49

Have you seen the old girl who walks the streets of London?

Speaker 114:55

Dirt in her hair

Speaker 114:58

And her clothes in rags She's no time for talking She just keeps right on walking

Speaker 115:07

Carrying in her heart

Speaker 115:10

And to carry your bags.

Speaker 115:15

So how can you tell me?

Presenter15:18

Your Lord.

Presenter15:20

That was Ralph MacTell in Streets of London. So Deborah Bull, from playing a Smarty in the Kingdom of Sweets for a show at Derbyshire Miners' Holiday Camp to getting into the Royal Ballet School, aged about twelve. That's quite a leap.

Deborah Bull15:32

Do you know, I don't really remember much about it. I remember my ballet teacher, Janice Sutton, saying she should audition for the Royal Ballet School. I thought that was probably what normally happened. Only now do I realize that in all of Janice's time she sent two students to audition for the Royal Ballet School forty or fifty years she's been teaching. So I've just had a strong sense this was what I wanted to do. No, stronger than that. This is what I was going to do. I was going to be a ballet dancer and if there was a logical next step to take, it was to go to the Royal Ballet School.

Presenter16:02

And your parents were happy to support you in that way?

Deborah Bull16:04

Absolutely. I mean, my mother would love to have been a ballet dancer. I know that. And so I have no doubt that a lot of that rubbed off on me. But they were incredibly supportive. It was, you know, it was challenging and difficult. The Royal Ballet School is a fee-assisted school, so in fact, the fees are the least of the problems. But when you add on theatre tickets and piano lessons and, you know, me coming home and saying, Mummy, mummy, can I? I don't cringe, but I feel sad. I wish I'd understood a little more how hard it was for them. But, you know, somehow, this is my mother's pragmatism and creativity. She always found a way. I have no idea how she managed it. So you were on.

Presenter16:38

I was there when you were eleven, twelve. Enduring puberty can be very difficult for any adolescent girl, but when you are in an environment where

Deborah Bull16:40

12

Presenter16:47

The dance aesthetic is is super lean and pretty flat-chested. It I mean, it must have been.

Deborah Bull16:53

Very difficult.

Deborah Bull16:54

No, I mean it was really later on in my career that I struggled with maintaining that necessary physique. The actual going through puberty bit wasn't such a problem. I mean you you go through adolescence there and that's interesting because of course part of the purpose of adolescence is to allow you to take risks, to go off the rails in a safe environment. Within ballet training it's quite hard to do that because you do need the discipline, you do need to be up every day, you don't want to rebel against your teachers because actually they're the people who can get you where you want to be. Right, we do need to fit in the music of course Deborah. What are we going to hear next? Next we're going to hear a piece of Mozart. I fell in love with Mozart and it's a love affair that's never ended. I could have chosen any number of pieces but I've chosen the overture from The Marriage of Figaro and I've chosen this because more latterly at the Opera House I presented the live big screens and we always came back to The Marriage of Figaro as the perfect piece of cutting music so that we would use it for the title sequence. So for me this brings the adrenaline of a live performance. I'm standing there, earpiece in my ear and at the end of it there's a Pavlov and his dogs moment when those last bars play out and I hear the producer going Coming to you live Deborah five four three two go.

Presenter19:05

Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, played by the Staats Kappila Derusten Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis. So, Deborah, let's talk for a moment about life in the Corps de Ballet. It's an ensemble role, but I'm imagining that whilst one's in the Corps de Ballet, the need to try to distinguish yourself as being better than and worthy of elevation to the next role must come pretty strong.

Deborah Bull19:27

Yeah.

Presenter19:27

Yeah.

Deborah Bull19:27

You're absolutely right. That is the tension. You have to stay in line. You have to be identical to the next person. I'm not higher. I'm not lower. At the same time, you are desperate to prove yourself and to stand out and shine. But it's a much more collegiate atmosphere than people think. Of course, sometimes you look and you think, well, why she got that? I don't understand. I work harder. She misses class all the time. I'm really good. Actually, in the end, most of us can see when talent arrives and when talent is deserving. So I waited, I think, about five years to be promoted to Corafe. It was a really slow burn.

Presenter20:06

Can you paint a picture for us of being a principal ballerina, waiting in the wings? You know your music queue is coming shortly, you're peeling off your leg warmers, you're scuffing your satin point shoes in the resin box, and you feel what?

Deborah Bull20:19

Yeah.

Deborah Bull20:20

Everything crowds in on you. You have this sense of the ghosts hovering, the people who've danced the role before, the people that you have to live up to. You have a sense of your own expectations. For many dancers there's a strong sense of self-doubt comes in. I can't do it, I can't do it. So it's a very profound moment. You have a sense of all of those ambitions, years and years of wanting, months and months of rehearsing, and suddenly

Deborah Bull20:48

The moment is there. When people arrive

Presenter20:50

live at the Royal Opera House and its equivalents around the world, what they're wanting, what they're expecting is perfection. I mean, I sat next to people at the ballet and and had them count the amount of birouettes just to see that the the Prima ballerina gets it.

Deborah Bull21:05

Yeah.

Deborah Bull21:06

Yeah. But I think you raise a question about what is perfection? And I think one person's perfection is yes, she did thirty two fuetes with a double at the beginning and a double at the end tick.

Presenter21:10

Got

Deborah Bull21:16

And another person's perfection is, well, she fell over in the first entrance, but my goodness, I had never thought about that relationship between Romeo and Juliet. I had never felt loss. So I think people are looking for a different kind of perfection. Are you able to recall a single performance where you thought that's it? I captured it.

Presenter21:37

Yeah.

Deborah Bull21:37

There was a performance of Don Quixote in Japan where I was yet again stepping in. I was upside down, literally. We had two days. I was jet lagged. My partner was sick.

Deborah Bull21:47

We went on, and from somewhere I found the reserves of strength, of self-belief, and confidence to do the show. And um it was the most extraordinary experience. I I went home and I yeah, I I think I wrote, you know, I hugged this unusual bedfellow to myself, this sense yeah, I'd nailed it. It moves you still to think about it.

Presenter22:06

It does, it does.

Deborah Bull22:08

Yeah.

Presenter22:08

Let's have some music then while we enjoy that. What are we going to hear now?

Deborah Bull22:12

If I ever had a signature ballet, this was it. It was a piece called Step Text by William Forsythe. I had the luxury of six weeks in the rehearsal studio with Bill, and so I felt I carved this ballet into my body. Even now, when I hear it, I have a sense of exactly how I'm supposed to be doing it. And it was 13 minutes, barely left the stage, an endurance test, red litard, no tights, nothing else. Totally exposed. Wonderful.

Presenter23:38

Bach's Waiden Partita in D minor Chacon, performed by Nathan Milstein. So, Deborah Bull, let's talk then about the rigors of maintaining a perfect physique as a principal dancer. It's difficult. It's very difficult.

Deborah Bull23:53

Yeah.

Deborah Bull23:54

I think it becomes difficult for a lot of people because there's a lot of emotion wrapped up in that. I was a child, if you like, of what I call the great protein myth. You know, that seventies idea that we should all eat protein and no carbohydrates. And gosh, isn't that back? So what a lot of people do, and it's not just dancers, is reduce their intake of carbohydrates and increase their intake of protein, and then try to do exercise. Well, in fact, that's a really inefficient way to fuel activity. That's when injury happens. So in every sense, it's completely mad. And I went wrong a lot of times.

Presenter24:28

Well, tell me about that then. I mean, did somebody take you to one side and say, you know, you're three or four pounds too heavy or you're not looking quite right?

Deborah Bull24:37

It wasn't quite as scientific as that. It was rather brutal. I was in the dressing room, and the ballet mistress called across the room, Deborah, I do think you should stay off the milkshakes. I know, I know. And I look back now and I think, gosh, it was another time. And that did have a big effect. I never suffered from a named eating disorder. I just, like a lot of people, went through cycles where I would try not to eat and then where my body would say, come on, and I'd eat too much. I was very fortunate that I entered a relationship with a physiotherapist, and he was the first person to strip all the emotion away from it and look at it scientifically. And I was able to use my intelligence and my ability to analyse to get over that whole period.

Presenter25:22

Dame Lynette de Valois was the woman who started the Royal Ballet. And you were actually I was going to say you were lucky enough to be on the end of her attentions. She was still around intermittently when you were dancing. W what happened when you encountered her?

Deborah Bull25:35

She was and I I do feel lucky to have been on the end of her touches,'cause it just makes for good stories, really. I mean, she always seemed old, venerable, hugely important influence in British ballet, never mind the Royal Ballet. She didn't like my surname.

Deborah Bull25:49

She had a real problem with my surname, so she would say Deborah Deborah Bull, Deborah Bull. I must talk to her father about that name.

Presenter25:56

Uh

Presenter25:57

What about Rudolph Nureev? Did you at any point I mean, I'm sure you must have seen him dance but did you ever encounter him? Um

Deborah Bull26:04

Yes, I did. This is a little known minuscule footnote to Dance history. His last performance at the Royal Opera House was in a performance of Romeo and Juliet, where he danced Macutio, and I was Macutio's harlot. So, technically speaking, I was his last ever partner at the Royal Opera House. Now, as I say, it wasn't in the principal role, but it was a huge privilege. Let's have some more music, Deborah Pool. Tell us what we're going to hear now. Every year, the Royal Ballet would do a big tour, Japan or America. In 1986, we went to Russia and I was bitten in Moscow. I don't know by what. I just saw this thing on my leg. I was determined to go to dance at the Kirov, and so I went to the doctor, got painkillers the size of gobstoppers, and made the flight, but I couldn't walk.

Deborah Bull26:48

Eventually I had to give up and say no, no, and I was flown home. But there was a period when I was existing on these four hour pain killers, and I would take one at midnight before I went to sleep, and then at four o'clock I would wake up in screaming pain.

Deborah Bull27:01

And of course the painkiller takes twenty minutes to work, so what do you do in that twenty minutes? And I will play this C D of Poulank, and the second movement in particular has this beautiful soaring melody which would act as a kind of painkiller, and underneath it this throbbing continuum, which made me think, it's okay, life goes on.

Presenter28:21

The Andante Conmoto from Poulanck's Piano Concerto, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Charles de Troy, with Pascal Roger on the piano there. So, Deborah Boul, let's talk now about the arts, because that's the world that you are immersed in, and it's the world that you promote, and indeed on occasion

Speaker 128:34

America

Presenter28:37

have to defend and

Presenter28:39

We face considerable spending cuts, as we know, in public services, and the question over public funding of what can reasonably be regarded as elitist arts, given that most people do not experience them, how can it be justified, do you think, spending public money on things like opera and ballet?

Deborah Bull28:55

I think I have to pick you up on the notion of elitist arts because I've always felt the arts are practised by elite artists, but they're not intended for an elite group of people. And I'm particularly interested in how we explore the value of the arts more broadly. So not just within what you might call the closed environment of art centres, but actually across health, across well being, across communities, across regeneration. We don't live our lives in boxes, but we fund things in boxes. So we say that's the arts budget, that's the health budget, that's the education budget. For me, the arts are profoundly educational. If you explore and engage with the arts, you're necessarily engaging with those big questions of life. You're dealing with questions of loss, of identity, of pride, of nationhood. Everybody has the right to expand beyond their immediate horizons. And I think the arts are hugely important in allowing us to explore all those facets of humanity and to take some choices about how we behave.

Presenter29:56

When you were creative director of the Royal Opera House, you argued for the importance of mad ideas. What did you mean?

Speaker 430:01

Uh

Deborah Bull30:02

Yeah.

Presenter30:03

Ha ha.

Deborah Bull30:03

I think it's really important that we take leaps of faith and we take risk. The thing that fascinated me was what is the impact of success on an organisation's appetite to take risk. Because as you get more and more successful, you have more stakeholders, longer term plans, budgets, etc., etc., your capacity to take risk reduces. Now, if you bring in people to work within your organisation who aren't subject to those constraints, you can create a place where people can experiment, they can collaborate in mad and bold ways and come up with new approaches. Let's have some music. You're sevenths. What are we going to hear? Well, when I set up ROH two at the Opera House, I was learning on the job. I had two things stood me in good stead, a clear vision of where I thought we needed to go. Total naivety about the pitfalls. But I knew I needed around me some new voices and some old hands. And I was very fortunate that Philida Ritter, who had been working with the organisation, moved across to help set up ROH two. It was an absolute decade of creativity.

Deborah Bull31:03

During that time, two thousand seven, two thousand eight, for the first time I experienced loss. Three women who were central to my life all died, and my mother, Pat Kavanagh, who was my agent, and Philida Ritter.

Deborah Bull31:15

And for Philadelphia we organised a little concert at the Opera House to mark her incredible achievement, to remember her. And we commissioned Helen Chadwick to write this piece with words by John Lloyd Davis, who worked in in my team, and it's called Unforgotten, and this is for Philadelphia, Pat, and my mum.

Speaker 431:31

Unforgotten

Speaker 431:36

Unforgotten

Speaker 431:40

Unforgotten.

Speaker 431:46

Where the key lie watches Over the world it play

Speaker 431:56

Unforgotten

Speaker 432:01

Unforgot her.

Presenter32:05

That was Unforgotten, composed by Helen Chadwick. She was also one of the performers, along with Joanna Foster, Barbara Gellhorn, and Hazel Holder. So, Deborah Bull, you've never had children, and I'm wondering if you think the level an extraordinary variety.

Presenter32:21

Of the work you've done would have been different, or indeed even possible, if you'd had to be a mother as well.

Deborah Bull32:27

It was something I guess I was always clear about. Yes, it was really. And of course, as I get older and you have you think, oh, was that the right thing to do? Actually, it was the right thing to do because it was the right thing at the time. It has made me more attached to the family I have. I call them my upwards family because I haven't got a downwards family.

Presenter32:31

That's it.

Speaker 132:32

Yeah.

Deborah Bull32:49

As we know from

Presenter32:49

From your introduction to The Last Piece of Music, your mother has died. Your father is still alive.

Deborah Bull32:54

I

Presenter32:55

Your mother was around, though, to see your great success. What have your parents made of your success?

Presenter33:00

Yeah.

Deborah Bull33:00

Yeah. Um

Presenter33:01

Yeah.

Deborah Bull33:01

My mum, as I said.

Presenter33:03

Yeah.

Deborah Bull33:03

Okay.

Deborah Bull33:05

Um I guess it's asking me to sort of define what I've done as success, which is not the way I look at myself actually. Right. I think that's why I laughed. But my mother, absolutely hugely proud. My dad, interestingly, when my last book came out, The Everyday Dancer, which it's not about me, but of course it's about the life of being a dancer.

Presenter33:12

Right.

Speaker 133:13

Yeah.

Deborah Bull33:26

He wrote me a lovely letter saying he couldn't put it down, and he said because I didn't know this about your life. So I suspect I've been quite private and self contained about the so called ininverted commas success. But I I think um I think Dad's proud of what I've achieved, yeah.

Deborah Bull33:45

Tell me about your final piece. I had a much too big birthday and on the spur of the moment decided to ask some friends and family to dinner. I was hoping Dad would do Streets of London, but he won't sing it anymore. However, he chose to sing Forever Young by Bob Dylan. So there's me, much too old. My Dad at the time, almost 78, singing Forever Young.

Speaker 434:07

May you always be courageous. Stand upright and be strong. And may you stay...

Speaker 434:20

Forever young.

Presenter34:39

Bob Dylan and Forever Young. So, Deborah, it's time for the books. I give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and one other book can go to the island. What's it going to be?

Deborah Bull34:48

I would like to take the massive four-volume Encyclopedia of the Human Brain, which is edited by V. S. Ramachandran.

Presenter34:55

And a luxury too.

Deborah Bull34:57

So much of what we did at ROH two was not recorded because it was all new. But actually my partner made a film of a piece by Will Tuckett called Pleasure's Progress, which is Will cresting the wave of his genius. It takes the Hogarth stories and and and brings them to life. If I wanted to weep, I could watch Gin Lane. If I wanted to laugh, I could watch Beer Street.

Deborah Bull35:17

Yeah.

Presenter35:17

That would be a luxury. Right, that's your luxury then. And which one disc of the eight would you like to save?

Presenter35:23

It would have to be the bark. Deborah Gould, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Deborah Bull35:28

Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Presenter36:05

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio Four website: bbc.co.uk slash radio four.